About the author

Justin thrives as a lead modeling author at Pluralsight. Growing up, Justin found a deep interest for the computer graphics industry after watching movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story and The Abyss. His ambition would lead him to work at Sony Imageworks in Los Angeles on movies like Monster House and Surf's Up. Justin has also had numerous articles, tutorials and images published in 3D World and 3D Artist.

Section Introduction Transcripts

Introduction and Project OverviewHi, and welcome to Creating Concept Vehicles in Maya, presented by Digital-Tutors and Autodesk Authorized Publisher. My name's Justin, and I'll be your instructor as we build a concept car from the ground up. Now whether they are featured in commercials, or feature films, video games, or as part of the automotive design process, vehicles are a mainstay of the computer graphics industry. Now while building an existing vehicle from detailed blueprints and reference can be a terrific modeling exercise, designing and modeling a vehicle that doesn't exist can give you a chance not only to use a variety of modeling techniques, but to stretch your imagination as well. And in addition to modeling we'll also explore the creation of believable shaders and textures that we can apply to our vehicle. So before we start building our car, we need to have some idea of what we want it to look like. Now drawing out very quick thumbnail sketches will help guide you towards your final design. As you're doing these loose drawings, try to think about what kind of vehicle that you want to create. If it's going to be a car as in this case, what kind of car? A luxury car, sports car, maybe an SUV or a little electric car, and what kind of look or attitude do you want it to have? Aggressive, functional, or maybe just a fun little car. We also need to think about functionality and grounding the car in reality, because the truth is, we're not designing a car to function in any way, but we do want it to look like it could function, that it could be a real car. Adding bits of detail to ground the car in reality will go a long way in making our concept car believable. So, let's go ahead and take a look at part of the thumbnail process that we went through on designing the vehicle for this particular training. And the first one that we're going to look at, this quick little drawing, you can see that it's a fairly conventional design, we've got four wheels, you know where the wheels on cars go, it's got a cab-forward design, so this large cockpit is up towards the front of the car, it gives it kind of a playful look, along with the smaller wheels that we've got going on here. It's kind of a futuristic look, it's fairly low to the ground, and, there are things to like about it I like some of the lines but, it's a little bit too playful for what we want to do, I think we want to go a little bit more aggressive. So the next one, is definitely more aggressive. It's still, sort of futuristic, it's got a little bit more of a dragster look and a little bit of a boxier design, got prominent scoops here on the back, and these really exaggerated wheels, back wheels there. I still like the way the cockpit is, I even like this a little bit more, it's kind of squeezed down, it's not so wide, gives it a little